Parallel evolution in Aussie plants reported in ScienceShots 5 June 2012 and ABC News in Science 6 June 2012. Flowering plants attract pollinating insects with their bright colours and, according to ScienceShots: “Scientists have even shown that, in the Northern Hemisphere, flowers' coloring patterns evolved specifically to meet the nuances of insect vision”. However, the same scientists also believe Australian plants have been geographically isolated for 34 million years, which they claim is before flowers evolved colour, so they cannot assume Australian plants have also evolved colour to suit insects.

A group of researchers have now studied 111 species of Australian flowers and compared the light reflected by the flowers with the spectrum of light that native bees are sensitive to. This includes ultra-violet light as well as visible light. Insects can see ultra violet light and many flowers that look very plain under white light only have distinctive patterns when viewed with both white and ultra-violet light. The scientists concluded that Australian flowering plants have independently evolved to suit the photoreceptors of bees, just as the northern hemisphere plants have. This is an example of parallel evolution across the two hemispheres.

According to Adrian Dyer, a vision researcher who led the study, all bees detect colour in a similar way and this proves the flowers evolved to suit the bees and not the other way around. He explained: “We know that bees' ability to detect colour links back to a common ancestor around 300-400 million years ago, and there's no evidence at all that bee vision has tuned since then to suit flower colours - it's been a one-sided evolution in both the Northern Hemisphere and Australia”.

Editorial Comment: It is worth noting the story above is being told by vision researchers who claim vision evolved first. When the story is told by botanists, they claim that plants drove the evolution of bees. (See “How to Grow a Planet” Episode 2: The Power of Flowers, BBC 2.) All of which tells us that we are not dealing with facts here but the presuppositions of whoever is making the story fit their priorities. Our advice? Always ask what would it take to prove such stories wrong. In this case the answer is three fold.

First: finding a fossil flower in the wrong layer since all the above stories assume they have all the fossil data. We predict that fossil flowers containing traces of colouring material will be found in all the wrong strata, just as fossil pollen has been found in Precambrian layers and been almost totally ignored. (See “Occurrence of Pollen and Spores in the Roraima Formation of Venezuela and British Guiana” R. M. Stainforth Asociación Venezolana de Geología, Minería y Petróleo, Apartado 4400, Chacao, Estado Miranda, Venezuela. Nature 210, 292 - 294 16 April 1966;)

Second: it pays to remember that the presence in bees of green, blue and UV receptors will never in any way insert new genes into plants that cause them to firstly to produce flowers or force the production of colours and patterns. The plants would die out long before they evolved such things. Neither would evolving coloured flowers somehow ever produce new genes for photoreceptors in bees. These evolutionist stories explain neither how flowers developed their colours, nor how the bees got their photoreceptors.

Third: you can find both negative and positive information about such claims only by obtaining an eye witness account on the origin of bees and flowers. It is still a much more logical explanation that bees and flowers were created to complement one another as the eyewitness account from the actual Creator reveals in Genesis, and therefore plants had all the correct features from the beginning, and this is why they have survived in both the northern hemisphere and Australia. (Ref. prediction, pollination, insects, angiosperms, botany)